Authors: Javier Cercas
‘We walked past the patio of the discotheque, almost empty now, towards the darkness and started walking along the beach. In the sky a bright full moon was shining and, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness and as we approached the water, it revealed a cove bordered by two hills and strewn with lumps on the sand like shadowy shells. They’re here, on the beach, whispered Tere when we got to the water’s edge, sitting down on the sand; she added: We’ll smoke a reefer. How do you know?, I asked. What a question, she said. Because I’m going to roll one. How do you know they’re here?, I clarified. Tere licked the paper of a cigarette, peeled it, emptied the tobacco into the rolling paper she had spread out in her hand and answered: Because I do. She finished rolling the joint, lit it, took five or six tokes and passed it to me.
‘I sat down next to her and smoked listening to the sound of the waves breaking against the shore and watching the moonlight bouncing off the surface of the sea and diffusing a silver brilliance over the whole cove. Tere didn’t say anything and neither did I, as if we were both exhausted or lost in thought or hypnotized by the spectacle of the beach at night. After a while Tere stubbed out the joint and buried it in the sand; she stood up and said: I’m going for a swim. Before I could say anything she stripped off and walked into the sea that looked like an enormous and silent black sheet. She swam away from the shore and, at some point, stopped and started calling me with muffled little shouts that echoed around the whole cove. I took off my clothes and ran into the water.
‘It was almost warm. I swam out to sea a bit, away from Tere and, when I stopped, I turned around and realized I was in the middle of an immense darkness and that the few little dots of light on the beach were very far away and Tere had disappeared. I swam back towards shore, with strong strokes, but when I stood up I still couldn’t see Tere. With the water up to my waist I looked for her without finding her, and during a moment of panic I imagined she’d left and taken my clothes with her, but then I saw her silhouette emerging from the water to my left, twenty or thirty metres away. I walked out of the water too, feeling that the swim had dissipated the inebriation of the alcohol and hash and calmed the tachycardia of the uppers, and, when I got to Tere, she had already covered up with her T-shirt and was barefoot and sitting on her jeans. Standing up, I put my underwear and jeans on as fast as I could, and still hadn’t finished buttoning my shirt when Tere asked: Hey, Gafitas, me and you haven’t had a shag yet, have we? I got my buttons all mixed up. No, I managed to say. I don’t think so. Tere stood up, took my hands away from my shirt and started unbuttoning the ones I’d got mixed up; I thought she was unbuttoning them to button them up properly, but while she was still unbuttoning them she kissed me, and while she was kissing me I guessed that she was naked from the waist down. Again she asked: Well it’s about time we did, don’t you think?
‘You can imagine the rest. And, as I told you before, as a result of what happened that night I believed everything was going to change between Tere and me and from then on Tere would stop being an imaginary character in my imaginary harem to become only a real character, or that the real character and the imaginary one would meld together into a single one; and I also thought that, although from then on she might not become my girlfriend, at least we’d sleep together every once in a while. It wasn’t like that. Maybe the fact that this episode happened very close to the time of Guille’s death and Chino, Tío and Drácula’s arrest might have contributed to it not turning out like that, but the truth is it wasn’t like that. And everything got complicated. But that, if you don’t mind, I’ll tell you next time. Now I’m running late: I have to get going.’
‘Of course. But I wouldn’t like to stop without you telling me what happened to your friends that night.’
‘Ah, nothing important. The next day I found out at La Font. Gordo and Lina left the Marocco early, they took Piti back to the hotel in L’Escala and went home. Zarco slept with Elena in some hotel in L’Escala, and in the morning went back to Gerona too, just like Tere and I did. We never heard any more from Piti and Elena.’
‘So it wasn’t true that night that Zarco and Elena were on the beach, as Tere had said.’
‘No.’
‘Do you think Tere knew or suspected and lied to you because she wanted to seduce you?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘I’ll put the question another way: did you never think that Tere had slept with you that night out of spite, to get even with Zarco, because he’d left with Elena?’
‘Yeah. But I didn’t think that then. I thought it later. And only briefly.’
‘And later? I mean: and now?’
‘Now what?’
‘Now what do you think about that?’
‘That it’s not true.’
‘Tell me about Gafitas.’
‘What do you want me to tell you? A policeman’s life is full of strange stories, but the story of Gafitas is among the strangest that’s happened to me since I started this job. At first perhaps you might not think so: after all it’s not that rare to see a case of a middle-class kid or upper middle-class or even an upper-class kid get involved with a gang of
quinquis
and suchlike. At least it wasn’t so rare back then; in fact, a while later I knew of a similar case, although that was in the tough years when kids were going astray on drugs, while in Gafitas’s day drugs were only just starting to arrive and it’s harder to find an explanation for what happened. I at least don’t have one, and this is something I’ve never talked to Cañas about since; I’ve talked to Cañas about other things, but never this: for us it’s as if it never happened. How do you like that? But anyway, if he’s telling you the story of his relationship with Zarco, I imagine you’ll already have an explanation of why he ended up in his gang.’
‘Cañas says it was by chance.’
‘That’s not an explanation: everything happens by chance.’
‘What I mean is that Cañas says he met Zarco by chance; the reasons he joined his gang are something else. According to him, the main reason is that he fell in love with Zarco’s girl.’
‘You mean Tere?’
‘Who else?’
‘Zarco had a lot of girls; and Tere a lot of guys.’
‘He means Tere. Does that surprise you?’
‘No: I think it’s interesting. What other explanations has Cañas given you?’
‘He’s told me that Zarco went looking for him. Or that he didn’t just join Zarco, rather Zarco also recruited him: according to Cañas, Zarco needed someone like him, someone who spoke Catalan and looked like a nice boy and could act as a decoy for their jobs.’
‘That sounds a bit unlikely to me. I mean, I’m not saying that a good decoy couldn’t have come in handy for Zarco, but I don’t think it would have mattered to him enough to go out and look for one, among other reasons because he used to do things bare-faced, without any screen.’
‘Not that he was looking: he just found one.’
‘Well, then maybe so. In any case it’s true that Gafitas wasn’t like the rest of the gang; that was clear as day: although he soon started dressing like them, and combing his hair and walking and talking like them, he never looked like one of them; he always looked like what he was.’
‘And what was he? A middle-class teenager taking a walk on the wild side?’
‘More or less.’
‘Do you mean that he never took what he was doing with Zarco seriously?’
‘No: of course he took it seriously; if not he never would have gone as far as he went. What I mean is that he always thought, as serious as it was, that it was just temporary, that he’d stop and return to the fold and then it would be as if nothing had ever happened. That’s my impression. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. In any case, ask Cañas. Or don’t waste your time: I’m sure Cañas will say I’m wrong. Up to you.’
‘From what you say, you guys didn’t see Gafitas the same way you saw the rest of them.’
‘We saw him for what he was, as I said, just that he wasn’t like the rest. And if you mean did we treat him differently from the rest, the answer is no . . . Although maybe I should qualify this. The truth is at first, when he showed up in the district with Zarco and the rest, we thought it would just be a fleeting thing, one of those strange things the district sometimes turned up; the surprise was that he lasted and after a short time he was just one more of them. As for the end, well, judging by what happened in the end maybe you’re right: maybe we did always see him in a different light. But we’ll talk about the end later, right?’
‘Yeah. Let’s go back to the beginning. The other day you told me that the gang settled into shape when Gafitas arrived on the scene.’
‘That’s what I believe. Of course before Gafitas showed up there was already a gang more or less in existence: they stole cars and broke into holiday villas, snatched purses and stuff; but when Gafitas showed up things changed. Not because Gafitas wanted them to, of course, just because; these things happen all the time: something is added by chance to a mechanism and it unintentionally changes the way it works. That’s what might have happened when Gafitas joined Zarco’s gang. Or when Zarco recruited him, as Cañas says.’
‘Was it at that moment when you guys detected that there was a gang of delinquents operating in the city?’
‘No, it was earlier. I remember very well because for me the case began then. One morning Deputy Superintendent Martínez called all sixteen inspectors of the Squad into his office. That wasn’t too out of the ordinary; what was out of the ordinary is that the provincial superintendent was present at the meeting: that meant it was a serious matter. During the meeting the superintendent said very little, but Martínez explained that for some time they’d been receiving recurrent reports of robberies in the city and the towns and housing developments of the province; at that time the systems of suspect detection were very rudimentary, we didn’t have a computerized registry of fingerprints like they do nowadays and everything had to be done by hand, imagine what that was like. In any case the repetition of the robbery methods, Martínez told us, led them to believe that we were dealing with a more or less organized gang: the handbags were always snatched the same way, the cars always hot-wired the same way and the houses always broken into through doors or windows when they were empty; furthermore, witnesses spoke of kids doing the robberies. Here things got complicated because, as I think I told you already, there was no such thing as a teenage gang back then, or they didn’t exist the way they later did, or at least we didn’t know about them, so Martínez’s conjectures did not indicate a gang of teenagers but an adult gang who used kids to help them. This meant it wasn’t going to occur to anybody at first that Zarco’s gang had anything to do with those robberies, first because we didn’t even think of them as a criminal gang exactly, and second because, as far as we knew, they weren’t associated with any adults. Be that as it may, Martínez asked the whole brigade to be alert and assigned Vives to take charge of the case; our group had several things on our hands already, and Vives decided to divide us in two and asked me to devote myself exclusively to this case with the help of Hidalgo and Mejía.
‘That’s how I began to pursue Zarco without yet knowing I was pursuing him. Apart from bureaucratic tasks, my job up till then consisted mostly of interrogating victims and suspects, gathering evidence and spending the afternoons and evenings doing the rounds of the bars of the district, identifying, frisking and questioning anyone and everyone, keeping my eyes and ears wide open; from that moment on my job would still be the same, except that now my main objective was to arrest the gang we’d just been alerted to. Just at that time Gafitas showed up in the district, but I’d been trying to complete my mission for a relatively short time and hadn’t yet associated the gang I was looking for with Zarco’s gang.’
‘When did you associate them?’
‘Some time later. Actually, during the first weeks I was so disoriented that I only managed to establish that the robberies were the work of one gang and not a bunch of different gangs or isolated individuals, which is what I thought more than once at the beginning; I also came to think that the gang had no connection to the city or to the red-light district, that it had its centre of operations outside – in Barcelona, perhaps, or maybe in some housing development or town on the coast – and that they only came into the city on jobs and then left. It was a preposterous idea, but ignorance produces preposterous ideas, don’t you think? I had a few at least, until one day I began to suspect that Zarco and his guys could be connected to the robberies.’
‘How did you reach that conclusion?’
‘Thanks to Vedette.’
‘You mean the madam?’
‘Do you know her?’
‘I’ve heard about her.’
‘Of course, lots of people have heard about her, she was a legend in the district. The truth is she was a remarkable woman, and one who stood out in that scene. When I met her she was already getting on, but she still had her faux-grande-dame bearing, she still behaved with the arrogance of a woman who was once very beautiful and still ran her business with an iron fist. She was the proprietor of two clubs, La Vedette and the Eden; the best known was La Vedette, which also had a reputation for being the best hooker bar in the district, as in times gone by the Salón Rosa or the Racó used to have. It was a small L-shaped place, without a single table but with lots of stools lined up against the walls, opposite a bar that began just to the left of the entrance then turned left again and continued to the back, where two doors opened, one to the kitchen and the other to a stairway leading to the rooms upstairs; the walls were wood-lined and had no windows, several columns came out of the bar and reached up to the ceiling mouldings, a reddish light made objects and faces look unreal, the music of Los Chunguitos, Los Chichos and people like that was playing at all hours. Back then it was often full, especially on Saturdays and Sundays, just when we tended not to go to the district so we wouldn’t ruin the bar owners’ businesses by scaring away their abundant weekend clientele.